The Most Divine and Most Human Thing You Can Do

      Why should we love our neighbor as ourselves? Because my neighbor is myself. The person next to me is just as much "me" as I am. Sure, they inhabit a seemingly different body, they have a different set of experiences, emotions, relationships, and so on, but the person next to me is a mirror of who this person, myself, would have become if I had been born in that body, had that set of experiences, had been influenced by those relationships, and so on. The person next to me is a "me" from an alternate reality, so to speak.

Being kind and treating the person next to you as you want to be treated, when it comes right down to it, can only help you in the long run. Just from a purely selfish standpoint even. It helps to build the connections and relationships which you may need to survive. By placing the welfare of others as at least equally as important as your own, by ensuring everyone else's survival if you will, you increase the odds of your own, as well as the odds of the survival of your own progeny, family, and loved ones. I am reminded of the economic model which was described in the movie "A Beautiful Mind" by "who gets the blond?" Put simply, when you remove yourself from the equation and focus on the welfare of the people around you, everyone wins. When everyone in the group does this, then no one goes without. When people don't compete with one another but work together for each other's good then everyone prospers and can do so without guilt, shame, or having to worry about losing what they own.
The immaterial part of every human being, the logos of every human being, is born of God and is a piece, fractal, or shred of the Logos who is the image of God. By loving the person next to you like yourself, you are in fact loving God, being kind to God, being compassionate and showing empathy to God. In addition, by doing so you are simply obeying what God instructed, which is itself a demonstration of love and respect for God.
Loving your neighbor as yourself is submitting to that original image of God which is the "real" you. It is reconnecting with the person you genuinely are at your very core, unaffected and unadulterated by the dysfunctional survival responses of the human brain which are dominated by fear. Fear and love cannot coexist in the same space. Loving your neighbor as yourself is giving permission for the God who is Love to manifest through you uninhibited by this fear.
Loving your neighbor as yourself is both the most divine and the most genuinely human thing you can do.